‘Pauline Hanson is, just as she did in the 1990s, struggling to keep her party together.’
Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

Starting with Arthur Sinodinos, a lot of noises have been made in the last week about how One Nation is more sophisticated now, how the party has changed, and how it wouldn’t be so bad if the WA Liberals exchanged preferences in the upcoming state election.

This is rubbish. Pauline Hanson hasn’t altered a bit. Her views haven’t softened at all since the 1990s – she has even developed new enthusiasms for Islamophobia and climate change denial. And her party is stuffed full of the same sorts of fringe-dwellers, bigots, and opportunists that she has always attracted.

True, the precise targets of her scapegoating rhetoric have changed. Whereas once she was all about “the Aboriginal industry” and feared being “swamped” by Asian immigration, now she’s all about banning burqas and halal foods and placing Mosques under surveillance – she’s promised an inquiry to determine whether Islam is “a religion or a totalitarian ideology”.

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She still wants zero net immigration to Australia, and her other policies are the same patchwork of reactionary grievance porn that she pushed twenty years ago. Fathers’ rights, citizen-initiated referenda, the rollback of gun laws … these aren’t just old-timey One Nation obsessions. They’re all long-time staples of Australia’s populist far right, especially in Queensland.

Today’s One Nation’s assemblage of candidates and senators, are no less a grotesquerie than those who have come before. Indeed they regularly make a fair claim for being worse. Back in the 90s, poor old Ken Turner at least did some good as a Mall Santa in Townsville. Malcolm Roberts, by contrast, spent years sending out his unsolicited, unreadable summaries of bunk science to people who largely, sensibly ignored them.

With folks like this in the ranks, Hanson is, just as she did in the 1990s, struggling to keep her party together. They were only able to restore their voting bloc to four because rogue Senator Rod Culleton was bankrupt – expect more cracks to emerge as their term wears on.

Nothing has changed, nothing has improved. One Nation is, as it has always been, about as sophisticated as a “Fuck Off We’re Full” bumper sticker. Now as ever, their positions are a grab bag of far right enthusiasms, and their ranks full of the kind of folks who scan the sky for black helicopters, or think we’re months away from the imposition of Sharia law.

What has changed is the sea they swim in.

Australian politics has gradually been remodelled along Hansonist lines, so that they are no longer the outliers they might once have been.

There was, in recent days, some preliminary lauding of John Howard as the WA election approached, regarding his noble refusal to preference them during his time in office. Howard himself scuppered all that yesterday, saying “everyone changes in 16 years”. In promoting this self-serving nonsense, Howard highlighted how thoroughly opportunistic he has always been in his dealings with the party. He spent his entire prime ministership dog-whistling to the One Nation faithful, while he let people like Tony Abbott do the dirty work of destroying them.

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From 2001 this took the form of transforming refugee arrivals into a first-order political issue, enthusiastically participating in the war on terror, and the illegal invasion of Iraq, and turning Australia into a mini-me version of the US security state.

He unashamedly used all of these issues to drag the Liberal Party right, and to carry out the early stages of battering the Labor Party into its current state of meek submission on “border security”.

Given that Hansonist views on Aboriginal welfare and multiculturalism are now part of the fabric of conservative common sense, it’s difficult to see how she would now even be disendorsed as a Liberal for the kind of comments she made back in 1996.